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Justice Official Sees Weakening Of Moral Fiber

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Attorney General William P. Barr has singled out Woody Allen's explanation of his affair with Soon-Yi Farrow Previn, the adopted daughter of Mia Farrow, as a graphic illustration of the rampant permissiveness that Mr. Barr said weakens the country's moral fiber.

In a speech to a Roman Catholic group Monday night, Mr. Barr seemed to follow Vice President Dan Quayle's lead in attacking entertainment figures on moral questions. But unlike Mr. Quayle, who has assailed the fictional single mother, Murphy Brown, as a poor role model, Mr. Barr focused on a famous living resident of New York City, also the Attorney General's hometown.

Mr. Barr expressed dismay over Mr. Allen's reaction in a magazine interview in August to criticism of the filmmaker's relationship with Ms. Previn. The affair surfaced in a barrage of tabloid headlines as Mr. Allen and Ms. Farrow battled over custody of three children.

"Seeming genuinely puzzled by all the fuss," Mr. Barr said, "Mr. Allen explained to Time magazine that he was in love with the girl. And having fallen in love, Mr. Allen implied, it must follow as night follows day that the two of them would consummate their love in sexual intimacy. After all, he said, 'the heart wants what the heart wants.' "

"There you have it," said Mr. Barr. "In seven words Mr. Allen epigrammatically captures the essence of contemporary moral philosophy. The heart is presented as an unreasoning tyrant over which reason, and therefore morality, has no influence." He added, "Try that as an instruction for your children when they ask you if a particular course of conduct is good or bad."

Mr. Barr has never made a secret of his conservative posture on social issues. He has opposed distribution of condoms in schools and giving needles to addicts. He advocates overturning Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision establishing a legal right to abortion.

He regularly warns in speeches that the breakdown of traditional values contributes to crime. But the Attorney General is usually extremely wary about singling anyone out for criticism, a potentially volatile issue in the case of Mr. Allen, who is a subject of a police investigation involving child abuse in Connecticut. Mr. Allen has denied any wrongdoing.

Today, Mr. Barr and his aides said it was unfair to compare the Attorney General's speech with Mr. Quayle's criticism of Hollywood's portrayal of traditional values, and they asserted that the speech had not been aimed at Mr. Allen personally. In his speech, Mr. Barr said that Mr. Allen's comments were a "pithy summary of contemporary moral philosophy."

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Mr. Barr's brief comments on Mr. Allen formed the rhetorical high point of an otherwise dense discussion of morality and law delivered to the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. Mr. Barr is Catholic, and his three daughters attend parochial schools.

"This was a meeting of Catholic organizations, and I was addressing them as a Catholic as much as a public official," Mr. Barr said today in a telephone interview. "This was not a media event."

Mr. Barr's speech was largely devoted to what he called "25 years of permissiveness, sexual revolution and the drug culture. People have been encouraged to cast off conventional morality and old-fashioned restraints."

But Mr. Barr argued that the framers of the Constitution considered public morality essential to a successful government. "The founders believed that popular government and its laws necessarily rested upon an underlying moral order that was antecedent to both the state and to man-made law."

Aides to the Attorney General said that Mr. Barr's comments were not prepared for a political audience, and there seemed to be surprise among some aides that any reporters had heard the speech, which came to light in a report today by the Associated Press.

Mr. Barr said that Mr. Allen's comments represent "the guiding principle behind our moral decline -- the rallying cry of the long binge that began in the mid-60s."

A version of this article appears in print on October 8, 1992, on Page A00020 of the National edition with the headline: Justice Official Sees Weakening Of Moral Fiber. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe